The short and sweet guide to cooking Paleo

This article is mainly aimed at my friends in Finland. For someone who wants to switch to Paleo style of eating it might be daunting at first to figure out what to prepare for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. In my kitchen we rarely use any recipes, but instead mix and match few basic ingredients to prepare multiple different kinds of dishes. Therefore this article will also focus on basic foods and how to prepare them.

Our formula for larger meals (lunch and dinner) is very simple. We typically take one major protein source and combine it with vegetables, tubers, and salad. Here's what you can do: 

Protein

Salmon is relatively inexpensive and tasty, so it is the fish we use the most. We cook our salmon fillets either in an oven (225 degrees Celsius, 12 minutes) or on a frying pan (2-3 minutes / side). Throw in salt and pepper for taste, and squeeze some lime juice for extra flavor.

Turkey salad. Now I got hungry. Photo by: FotoosVanRobin

Minced beef can be cooked as it is on a frying pan, or you can make meatballs and hamburger steaks. Just add 1 raw egg for each 300-400 grams of meat, mix it in a bowl, throw in some spices such as pepper and rosemary, and shape them as you like. Cook either in the oven or on the frying pan.

Chicken or turkey fillets are easily prepared on a frying pan with some spices. One of my favorite recipes is to chop the meat into pieces, fry it, and when it starts to get ready throw in lots of curry, chili, and coconut cream.

Lamb has become our favorite this summer. It is very tender, tastes awesome and costs less than good beef steak. Cook some roast lamb on a frying pan, 2-3 minutes on both sides, throw in salt and pepper, put the lamb on a ceramic skillet, cover with aluminum foil and put the skillet to an oven for 10-12 minutes. You can spend that time getting ready to have an orgasm in your mouth. 

Vegetables and tubers

We have two basic methods that we use 95% of the time when cooking veggies: steaming and baking. Most of the stuff can be cooked either way.

Sweet potatoes and yams are tasty and especially good when eaten after a workout since they contain quite a bit of starch and can therefore help in recovery. The quickest way to prepare them is to simply cut the whole thing in half so you end up with two "boats". Cook them for 40-45 minutes in a 200 degree oven and you'll find them soft, tasty, and the skin comes off easily.

Another, a little more laborious, way to cook them is to first peel the skin, then cut the it in slices, and throw the slices in an oven for about 20 minutes. Our go-to spice mix for these is pepper, chili, cinnamon and a bit of butter or olive oil.

As for the other tubers and veggies, we regularly eat mushrooms (fried), zucchini (steamed, fried, or baked), broccoli (steamed, fried, or baked), carrots (steamed, fried, or baked), tomatoes (fried or as-is), different leafy salads (as-is), cucumber (as-is), onions (fried or as-is) etc. I would recommend spending quite some time on the fresh produce section in your grocery and just experimenting with stuff. There's a world of taste waiting for you.'

And if you feel like a lazyboy, just grab a pack of frozen veggies and steam them. It won't get easier than that :)

By combining different vegetables and tubers with fish and meats you can create a variety of dishes. Experiment with different spices and sauces and you can easily have a unique meal every day of the week if you want to. 

Breakfast and snacks

When I switched to a low-carb diet in spring 2009 figuring out what to eat for breakfast and snacks was the most difficult thing to get my head around. In some ways this got even trickier when I started eliminating neolithic foods. However, I do have some tips:

This egg didn't turn so well.

Eggs are your friend. Period. I'm not a breakfast person so very often I just boil 2-4 eggs, eat them as they are and maybe throw in a fruit or some nuts.

Omelets make a kickass breakfast - or even a larger meal if you add e.g. some bacon or smoked salmon. One of the advantages of omelets is that you can throw pretty much anything on them; tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, carrots... So if you have some leftovers from last night's dinner you can use those as well.

Speaking of leftovers, there's no reason why you couldn't have the same food you had for dinner as breakfast the next day. Or as a snack.

And when it comes to snacks, I've found some nuts and fruit to work very well, but I also enjoy boiled eggs quite often if I feel like snacking. Another thing that works wonders is coconut water; just mix 1/3 or 1/4 coconut cream with cold water, stirr, and drink.

If you want to get a bit more fancy, try this Trail Mix by MDA. 

Desserts

Think you can't enjoy sweet stuff simply because you want to eat healthy? Bullshit! Here's something to get you started - although I don't recommend eating this stuff every single day, especially if you're trying to lose weight :-)

Blueberries, melted dark chocolate, strawberries and coconut flakes. You CAN have an orgy in your mouth without feeling like shit afterwards.

Peel some apples and pears, and then slice them. Grease a ceramic skillet with some butter and throw the sliced fruit in. Top with crushed almonds, add a bit of honey and bake for 30 minutes in 175 degrees Celsius. Enjoy with some coconut cream (or vanilla sauce if you're feeling super decadent).

In general I just love coconut cream. The easiest dessert ever is to get some fresh berries (blueberries, strawberries and raspberries are insanely tasty), put them in a bowl and top with coconut cream.

A bit more fancy version of the same recipe would have you cover the berries in melted dark chocolate. Add few coconut flakes for color. Just don't do what I did the first time I made that and have the dessert sit in a fridge for couple hours before eating. The chocolate had become completely solid.

To summarize, a load of different kinds of desserts can be made by mixing and matching fruit, berries, dark chocolate, and coconut.

I would love to hear what kind of dishes you have managed to come up with, so please share in the comments :) Also, if you feel completely lost and enjoy using recipes, here's something to get you started:

• Mark's Daily Apple

• Everyday Paleo

PS. I'll try to take photos of all the foods we make at home during one week so with that you'll get a pretty good idea about what we eat.

Being healthy: There's more to it than not being sick

How do you feel today? Energetic? Tired? Frustrated? Awesome? Sad? Happy? Positive? Sick? Coming down with something?

My guess is that when you go to your regular check-up and the doctor asks if you feel healthy, you first take stock of your current situation. Are there any nagging pains? Discomfort? Depression? If the answer is no, you start looking backwards in time and try to pinpoint when was the last time you were sick. Then you think about the previous year or so and count how many times you were sick during that time. Finally, if there are no acute issues, you're likely to say "I'm fine, doc". But are you really?

Art DeVany, age 73, author of The New Evolution Diet, fit, active, and has not been sick in 30 years.

I used to be like that. If I was not sick I had to be healthy, right? I mean those are the two options. Feeling a bit low on energy or not having much interest to do anything except play World of Warcraft does not really count as a medical problem. How would I even have known that there was anything wrong with me because that's basically the condition I had been in for as long as I can remember? Sure, some days I was a bit more active and energetic but most of the time I was just sort of going through the motions of living; doing my work, eating food, sleeping, and escaping the daily grind in video games, movies, or riding a motorcycle.

Now I know better. Having tasted what health really means it is easier to recognize the sort of apathy I was in, and to recognize it as a health problem. Being healthy is not just absence of illness. It is a state of being where you feel active, energetic, happy, resourceful, positive, focused and strong.

I have come to believe that this is actually our natural state - not some "optimized" form of physical and mental prowess. This is what we have evolved to be like. Not just free of disease, but actually having physical strength, mental clarity and an all-encompassing good feeling about our bodies, our minds, and our lives.

Fixing your diet, getting rid of stress, sleeping well and being physically active should not be seen as attempts to change you into something you're not. What you're doing instead is getting rid of factors that make you sick, factors that prevent you from enjoying the health and well-being that is your birthright.

What is paleo?

A week ago in a friend's housewarming party I ended up having a conversation about diets, nutrition, and health (I wonder why this always happens... Is it just me or is this such a common topic?). The person I was talking with asked me for my opinion on paleo, or paleo diet, also known as primal or caveman diet. I thought it was such a good question that it definitely should warrant a more detailed answer - especially considering that a lot of the things I would recommend to people if they want to improve their health and performance are rooted in the paleo mindset.

Paleo diet, in short, consists of foods that humans ate and had access to during the paleolithic era. Foods such as meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, nuts, tubers, vegetables, roots, berries, fruit, mushrooms etc. - basically whatever you could get by hunting and gathering.

This is in stark contrast to neolithic era foods which include grains, legumes, dairy, beans, and potatoes. Also processed foods are on the off-list for those following paleo diet as those have been around for only about a century.

The underlying reason why we should eat paleolithic foods instead of neolithic ones is that during the course of human evolution we have adapted to a specific type of diet. Those individuals who have been able to thrive best with the foods available prior to agriculture are the ones who have survived and produced offspring.

The paleolithic era lasted from around 2.6 million years BC until the advent of agriculture around 10.000 years BC. Agriculture meant a major change in the diet of our ancestors, and considering that we spent hundreds of thousands of years on a very different kind of diet, our genes have not yet had enough time to adapt to do well with agricultural products. We tolerate them to some extent, but they do more harm than good if you want to optimize health and performance. Same logic can be used to processed foods which have been around for an even shorter time.

When talking about paleo diet, there are couple caveats that I think should always be considered:

Selection bias

The evidence we have on how our paleolithic ancestors ate is mainly based on archaeological findings (e.g. stone tools, spearheads stuck in the bones of huge game animals, fossilized remains) and research done on the modern-day hunter-gatherer populations such as the Masai and the Kitavans.

In other words, we do not have a complete, 100% accurate picture of what our ancestors ate. There may be relevant factors of which we have absolutely no idea because we have not found any evidence of them.  Also, there is no consensus on things like the ratio of animal based vs. plant based foods, or cooked vs. raw foods.

Grey areas

A quick Google search will show you just how many different paleo diet and lifestyle websites there are, so it shouldn't be a surprise that even amongst the proponents of paleo diet there are different perspectives and viewpoints on what the optimal diet should and should not consist of.

Practical application

Should we all go out and start hunting and gathering our food? Should we leave everything out of our diet that was not available to our paleolithic ancestors? I think not. Partly because of the selection bias and the limited information we can gather, but also because even though our ancestors did not eat something, it does not automatically mean that it would be bad for us.

Now we can get to the point I want to make about paleo, or at least share my personal opinion on paleo diet and lifestyle: paleo is a template, a framework, and a standpoint. It is rooted in evolutionary biology and gives us a solid foundation from which to generate hypotheses for testing. We can use the paleo framework to ask questions such as "if macronutrient composition is the same, but Group A uses grains as a carbohydrate source and Group B uses tubers, how does that affect biomarkers of health and disease?"

The premise of paleo diet would indicate that tubers are more healthy for us than grains. However we cannot make that conclusion without any evidence. Similarly we should not try to perfectly emulate the ancestral diet or lifestyle "just because." For example, I'm sure my paleolithic ancestor did not drink espressos, but it doesn't mean that I shouldn't - unless we start seeing proof that coffee consumption causes significant health issues.

We need to ask questions, do research, and through that process find out which aspects of the ancestral diet we should incorporate into our lives, where we can have some leeway, and what kind of trade-offs are required to optimize health. Individual variations will also come into play here. For example, I don't experience problems if I keep my dairy intake relatively low; butter for cooking and a shot of milk with coffee. Feed me a bagel or some cake and within 24-hours I get stomach pain and bloating. Every time I choose to eat something like that I am making a conscious choice of trading momentary pleasure for some future pain.

The next question is, can you actually benefit from following a paleo diet? I would say yes. A growing body of research indicates that grains, legumes and dairy are behind many of the so called diseases of civilization, and even if you don't have any direct gastrointestinal problems or a clear-cut case of celiac disease most - if not all - people can improve their health by eliminating these foods from their diets.

And as Robb Wolf puts it; give paleo diet a 30-day trial. See how you look, feel, and perform. Then you can start reintroducing neolithic foods and see how well you tolerate them. You have nothing to lose with this approach, but you're likely to end up feeling better than you ever thought possible, and by introducing foods back one at a time you can track your reaction to them with relative ease.

Clearing up confusion in nutritional science

Out of curiosity, how many different diets you know and can name? I was able to quickly come up with:

• High-fat, low-carb (and its varieties such as Atkins, Protein Power etc.)

• Low-carb, high-fat

• Vegetarian / Vegan

• Cyclical ketogenic diet

• The Zone

• Mediterranean diet

• Subway diet (!)

• WeightWatchers

• Paleo

All claim to be better for your overall health, decrease risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and help you lose weight - despite each diet giving recommendations that completely contradict each other. Now if you follow news you probably have noticed that one day high cholesterol increases risk of heart disease and the next day low cholesterol increases risk of stroke. Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners cause brain damage, but natural sweeteners damage liver! What else is there to do but stop eating altogether?

Hey, that might actually work! Studies show that calorie restriction increases lifespan in rodents, but then again not getting enough food is a stressor and therefore increases cortisol production which prevents fat mobilization and makes you lethargic... So you're back in square one.

The question is, how can you make sense of all of this? One big part of it is to learn to read research papers (and largely ignore news in mainstream media), to be able to separate correlation from causation, and to understand statistics well enough to see if data has been manipulated to show whatever the researchers believe in. This, however, is not the topic of this article.

Nutritional science in itself is less than a 100-year old discipline. A mere baby. And like in any other area of science there are factions; people who believe differently about what we should eat. On top of the different factions the science is also very fragmented. We have a research study here and another one there, but nothing to tie them together.

For example, let's say that there is a study that finds biological process X to be linked in cancer development. Now that biological process can be downregulated by lowering magnesium intake. Would you then go on and recommend people to take less magnesium? And by doing so ignore the hundreds of other biological processes where magnesium intake is a factor? Enter the confusion.

In order to bring all the fragmented research together and to start forming a comprehensive picture of what's going on, a guiding paradigm is needed. In physics we have both the classical Newtonian physics and more recently Quantum Mechanics. In cosmology there's the "Big Bang" theory. These are extremely important in providing the scientists a starting point, a perspective from which to evaluate the research they are doing. And the research either sits well in the theory or contradicts it. If enough contradictions arise the theory gets discarded, revised, or evolves into a new theory and brings us one step closer to enlightenment.

What boggles me is that even though nutritional science cannot be anything else but a subsection of biology, the guiding paradigm of biology - evolution by natural selection - is completely ignored in nutritional science. As a result we have fragmented information and no coherent way to interpret the data.

On the other hand, if you start considering nutrition research from the perspective of evolutionary theory, all the fragments of information start to suddenly make a lot more sense. As Prof. Loren Cordain puts it:

All human nutritional requirements like those of all living organisms are ultimately genetically determined. Most nutritionists are aware of this basic concept; what they have little appreciation for is the process (natural selection) which uniquely shaped our species’ nutritional requirements. By carefully examining the ancient environment under which our genome arose, it is possible to gain insight into our present day nutritional requirements and the range of foods and diets to which we are genetically adapted via natural selection. This insight can then be employed as a template to organize and make sense out of experimental and epidemiological studies of human biology and nutrition.

Maybe in the future we'll be wiser...

Note: this article would not have happened without me reading NorCal Nutrition: Are We Crazy? which contains a very good brief by Loren Cordain.

Dietary guidelines disconnected from reality

I am making this a rather short post, written quickly and prompted by an article I read late last night (courtesy of Dame Liberty and Robb Wolf on Twitter) on how the latest US government dietary guidelines recommend lowering sodium (read salt) intake. Merely a week after the recommendations were announced, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association argued that lowering sodium consumption does not benefit most people, and might actually increase risk of heart attacks for some.

Photo by: TheGiantVermin

As far as I can tell this is what usually happens: People demand the government to step in and act when a situation gains enough public attention and creates an outcry. Publicity is the keyword here. More important issues may go unnoticed, but whatever happens to be in the spotlight prompts swift action. After all, it's in the best interest of those elected to govern to at least maintain the illusion that they are listening to their voters.

So in order to please the general public those in charge are forced to make decisions. To take a stand. No matter the quality of information they have. If you look at the obesity epidemic, the connection between smoking and lung cancer, or whatever health issue that has gained a lot of public attention, they have all resulted in more or less hastily created government recommendations, or even laws.

In some cases this has worked pretty well (e.g. smoking bans - who doesn't love leaving the bar at 4am without feeling like an ashtray!), but in others the information at hand has simply not been adequate, and decisions have been made running blind. One example being the McGovern Committee that came up with the guidelines aimed at cutting the consumption of cholesterol and fat - especially saturated fat - in order to lower the amount of cardiovascular disease and conditions leading to it, including obesity. Yet the number of obese and overweight people has increased dramatically since the late 60's and early 70's of McGovern Committee - even though fat consumption has decreased.

The article says it better than I can, so I'm quoting here:

With the federal bureaucracy behind them, the guidelines became widely accepted even though subsequent research often questioned them. Two of the government's principal studies on diet and heart disease, published in the 1980s, were intended to offer reassurances, but instead produced results that were inconclusive, at best. The science has only gotten more troubling since then, as researchers have begun to wonder if the obesity epidemic is in some way related to the change in diet prompted by the guidelines. A 2008 article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine argued that Americans have actually followed the government's advice, reducing intake of fat and increasing the proportion of our calories from carbohydrates. The result had been a rise in overall calorie intake, leading the authors to wonder if, "the U.S. dietary guidelines recommending fat restriction might have worsened rather than helped the obesity epidemic." They criticized the government for relying on "weak evidentiary support" in the guidelines.

In April of last year Scientific American reviewed the mounting number of studies contradicting the governments point of view in a piece entitled, "Carbs Against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart." And in October of 2010 the journal Nutrition weighed in with a piece by five researchers entitled "In the Face of Contradictory Evidence: Report of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee," which cited dozens of peer-reviewed studies questioning the science at the foundation of the guidelines.

What makes this really troubling is that in a country like the US where legal action seems to be the norm in resolving disputes, the government faces a huge risk if they ever admit their recommendations were wrong and based on poor science. By refuting their earlier recommendations they will effectively make themselves vulnerable to legal action from all those people whose lives have been ruined by low-fat high-carbohydrate diets.

If you consider carbohydrate metabolism and its effects on insulin, those with Type 2 diabetes can make a strong argument that the government recommendations effectively made them diabetic. Wouldn't it then be the government that, in the end, is also responsible for their medical bills?

Now considering the number of overweight and obese people in a country like the US, this kind of action could reach massive proportions and the consequences might be absolutely devastating for the economy.

Government recommendations aside, if health is important for you then do your own research. Don't blindly trust what others say, and demand explanations for how stuff works. If someone (like me) tells you that you'll lose weight by cutting carbs and refined sugars from your diet, don't just accept it at face value, but ask why, what is the mechanism behind it?

And here's the article that resulted in this rant: Federal Food Police Against Business and Science. It's a quick read and gives a nice view on the quality of information some of the government recommendations are really based on, yet those recommendations tend to become the accepted dogma and never questioned by public.

Stop being a sheep and take responsibility of your own health and performance.

So you want to get lean, build muscle, and finish an Ironman?

Me too, but it’s not going to happen. You know why? Because you’re giving your body mixed signals. One day you’re telling it to grow strong, which pretty much equals putting on weight (yeah yeah I know you can increase strength without mass gains due to e.g. nerve conditioning but for the sake of argument let’s forget about that for a moment, ok?), then you go underfed and “cut” some body fat on a marathon treadmill session while also catabolizing the muscle you were trying so hard to build. A week from that and we see you in your skin-tight shorts, riding a bicycle on an 80km escape from family life.

And then you wonder why you’re not getting results.

Korean pop star Rain on Ninja Assassin

Your body is pretty amazing at adapting to the stress you put it under, but you need some consistency if you want to make significant changes. Want to look like Brad Pitt on Fight Club (or Rain in Ninja Assassin which has replaced Brad as the “gold standard” - at least in my books)? Then your training and diet should consist of things that enable efficient burning of fat while also preserving lean muscle.

And if you start crying over not making any personal records on deadlift or squat, it’s time for a reminder: what was it that you set out to do again? If you want to lift more you’re certainly not going to do that with a protocol that emphasizes fat loss. You’re lucky to maintain your strength at its current level.

The next time you go to a gym, a run, swimming, yoga, or whatever it is that you’re doing, ask what your goal really is, and is your current way of training actually aligned to that goal?

Or maybe you don’t have a goal. In that case make one for yourself. And track your progress. It will make working out immensely more motivating. Trust me.

Just be sure not to sweat over things that are not related to reaching your goal. Instead, focus on stuff that matters. If you want to lose weight you need to concentrate on weight, fat %, waist circumference etc. All else is secondary. Sure, it is nice to notice that you’re able to run faster or lift more, but it shouldn’t matter. Neither should possible losses in strength. Not until you’ve reached your goal. 

The best books of 2010

Like my best books of 2009 post, this is not about books that were released in 2010, but about the ones I actually read during this year. Last year there were ten books worth mentioning, but this time the number is smaller.

Almost exactly a year ago I started dating a girl (who’s sitting opposite to me in a coffee shop as I am writing this), spent the spring balancing between school and work, and since August we have been living and studying together in Seoul, South Korea. With so much things to do and see and a new language to learn, there simply hasn’t been that much time to focus on reading.

Nevertheless, here is my TOP 5 of 2010:

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes

It took me a long time to finish this book, and after reading so much about nutrition already I had a hard time immersing myself into “just another diet book”. However, Good Calories Bad Calories caught me completely by surprise. This is not a diet book. It is a book about science in nutrition research, obesity, and disease prevention by dietary means. And not just any book, but the most extensively researched and scientifically backed book that I have ever read in my life.

If you have read my original post about weight loss, the consequent three posts about where caloric balance hypothesis goes wrong, what actually causes us to accumulate fat, and what we should do in practice to get fit, and you still have doubts about the whole thing, then read this book!

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

I finished this small book last night at 2am, just a few days after getting it. For over a year now I have thought about starting my own business without actually getting anywhere closer to it, besides scribbling a few business ideas on my notebook in the middle of the night when my brain is on overdrive and I can’t get any sleep. I just thought that I’d figure it out after my studies in South Korea are finished and I have two months of holiday to work on it before returning to Finland.

However, earlier this month partly by luck, whim, and coincidence I ended up getting a small role in a Korean TV show called Athena, and it had much more profound effect on me than I had dared to imagine. I loved the feeling of everyone in the set putting their hearts and minds into making the show as good as they can - even though it meant spending the whole night in the shoot.

I want to part of something like that, and therefore once again I got stuck with the problem of what I actually want to do “when I grow up.” I am halfway through getting a Master’s Degree in Entrepreneurship, yet I am thinking about throwing myself into movies. More precisely writing and directing. Storytelling.

The War of Art is about an inner force that Pressfied has named ‘Resistance’. It is what keeps us from realizing our potential and pursuing our dreams. It is what stops writers from writing and entrepreneurs from starting companies. It makes the songwriter watch TV, surf the Internet and play video games when she should be writing and composing instead.

Not only does Pressfield’s elegant prose describe and help you recognize the enemy, but within this book one can find a way to beat it.

Where the Good Calories, Bad Calories is the most important book of the year with the potential to even change public policy, The War of Art has been personally the most significant book I have read.

The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

This book looks into what separates the very best athletes in the world from those who are by all means great, but never seem to reach the top of the mountain. It then applies these principles into business world. It is a productivity book that does not focus on methods, techniques and systems, but on how to feel being at your optimal level of focus, concentration, and productivity.

I started applying the Full Engagement principles in my own life already before reading the book and even wrote an article about them for Lateral Action blog. These principles emphasize rest and recovery for superiorsustained performance, and the amount of energy we have depends on our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual strength. These aspects need to be in balance and they need to be nurtured in order to achieve both high productivity and satisfaction in one’s life.

SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham

If you are at all interested in selling and sales techniques, this is the book to read. It carries way more weight than most of the books written by sales ‘gurus’ because there is actual scientific evidence to show why and how the SPIN method works.

The book makes a difference between small one-time sales and large corporate selling, and shows through actual research why methods that work for small scale sales are causing the other type of sale to fail. It provides a clear method on what to do in different phases of the sale in order to succeed.

The Element by Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson has been a speaker in TED for two times, and his first talk about how schools kill creativity may very well be the most watched TED talk of all time. In fact, some of the case examples in the book are the very same Robinson mentions in his talk - using the exact same wording.

The Element is partly about creativity, finding your passion and pursuing it, why it is important and how to do actually do it, and partly about the outdated western educational system that is failing to prepare children to face the challenges of 21st century.

It is an easy and entertaining read, but when it comes to finding your passion, well, I am still looking.

I’d love to hear about the books you have read and would recommend to others!

Have a good 2011 everyone!

PS. I just realized couple days ago, that I forgot to mention arguably the most beautifully written book I read the whole year. That book is The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. It is basically about being a man, and what it means in the modern age. I can easily recommend it to any guy for its content, and to anyone interested in books simply because of the writing style:

"Closing down in the midst of pain is a denial of a man's true nature. A superior man is free in feeling and action, even amidst great pain and hurt. If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one. He should learn to stay in the wound of pain and act with spontaneous skill and love even from that place."

Summer 2010 workout routine

Four weeks ago I wrecked up my left foot while doing sprints in a park. For the two following weeks I was barely able to walk. I had x-rays taken but nothing seemed amiss. Still, the diagnose was a minor fracture caused by excess strain.

After spending about a week in self-pity, lying on the couch and agonizing over missed exercise, I decided to hit the gym. Even though I was limping there was nothing wrong with my upper body. I soon found out that even though walking hurt like hell I was also able to do squats and leg presses without problems. Go figure. And since running and Yoga were out of question, I started to tweak my old gym routine.

Photo by Scootzsx

I reacquainted myself with a blog specialized in muscle growth which I had found already over a year ago, and to my luck the author Mark McManus had just published his newest take on Targeted Hypertrophy Training. I started reading and actually gained some new insights:

1. Muscle growth (overcompensation) does not take place until after the muscle has recovered from the workout. This means that if you train too often your body will never have time to actually increase the size and strength of the muscle.

2. In order to maximize growth, you should reach failure at around 1-minute mark when doing strength training. If you reach failure much sooner you are not able to recruit all muscle fibers and thus limit the opportunity for growth. If, on the other hand, you reach failure much later it is your aerobic system that is stressed, not muscular strength.

3. Both compound and isolation exercises are needed for optimal benefits. I’ve been solely focusing on compound exercises without realizing that they cause certain muscles to fail sooner than others - thus limiting the potential for growth in the less strained muscles.

4. The best exercises are those where the largest load on the muscle occurs when it is fully contracted. E.g. bicep curls as such are inferior as the load is not fully on the biceps in fully contracted position - unless done with a machine that overcomes this.

Armed with this information I set on to create a new workout routine for myself. I used Mark’s 5-day program as a basis, but since I have no time to hit the gym five times a week I came up with a 3-day program of my own.

After experimenting with the exercises and feeling pretty settled on them, I went to the gym for one marathon workout with my girlfriend. We timed each exercise to see how many reps we can do in one minute. This was an eye-opener. I’ve considered myself to train with a steady pace - a bit on the slow side - and good form, and I assumed I’d manage about 10 reps. However, to my surprise even some of the exercises that I considered slow took altogether 14 or 15 reps before the one minute mark.

This basically meant that I had been training outside the anabolic window, where the largest number of muscle fibers are recruited and strained, and as a result the largest opportunities for muscle growth occur.

As I finalized my new workout routine I divided all the exercises into 4 rep range groups depending on how many reps I did within a minute at my own pace. The one minute mark took place during either the last rep, or one after that - e.g. in a range of 8-12 it took me 12 or 13 reps before the one minute mark. However, I’d recommend that you record the time at your own pace, and come up with your own target number of reps.

Although this routine is not as intense as the one in Targeted Hypertrophy Training, I’d still keep about one week between working out the same muscles to give time for recovery and overcompensation. For example, you could go to gym on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and do a separate workout each day, or do the workouts with always one resting day in between.

Legs + Triceps

• Squat (10-14 reps)

• Squat (10-14 reps)

• Leg press (10-14 reps)

• Leg extension (8-12 reps)

• Leg curl (10-14 reps)

• Standing calf raise (12-16 reps)

• Seated calf raise (12-16 reps)

• Standing calf raise (12-16 reps)

• Tricep pushdown (8-12 reps)

• Tricep pushdown (8-12 reps)

• Tricep dip (12-16 reps)

Back + Shoulders

• Deadlift (8-12 reps)

• Deadlift (8-12 reps)

• Barbell row (12-16 reps)

• Barbell row (12-16 reps)

• Dumbbell lateral raise (8-12 reps)

• Dumbbell lateral raise (8-12 reps)

• Military press (6-10 reps)

• Military press (6-10 reps)

• Barbell shrug (12-16 reps)

• Barbell shrug (12-16 reps)

Chest + Biceps + Forearms + Abs

• Bench press (8-12 reps)

• Bench press (8-12 reps)

• Pec deck (6-10 reps)

• Pec deck (6-10 reps)

• Pullup (8-12 reps)

• Bicep curl (6-10 reps)

• Bicep curl (6-10 reps)

• Reverse wrist curl (12-16 reps)

• Regular wrist curl (10-14 reps)

• Sit-up (8-12 reps)

• Sit-up (8-12 reps)

• Headstand (as long as you can keep it :) This is a legacy exercise from the time I did yoga and might take some practice at first)

Some of the exercises such as dumbbell lateral raises can be followed straight away with military presses, but in general I’d recommend keeping at least a 2,5 minute break between sets to ensure that the strain is concentrated on muscles instead of cardiovascular system. And if you reach the end of the rep range, remember to increase the amount of weight the next time you work out to ensure continuous progression.

When it comes to nutrition, the people who follow this blog should know that I’ve been eating primal / low-carb fare for a year and a half now. I won’t go into dietary details in this post, except for saying that I’ve done the following tweaks to my diet:

• No more post-workout carbs

  • If I would load myself up with carbs three times a week after gym sessions, it would most likely have a seriously adverse effect on my insulin levels. Muscle gain might increase somewhat but at the expense of gaining also body fat. Instead, I now enjoy low-carb protein shakes or bars and normal low-carb meals also during the workout days.

• Carb-cycling

  • This means that I deliberately increase the amount of carbs from Friday night to Saturday night, allowing myself to enjoy certain vices such as chocolate and ice cream, as well as eat foods I normally stay away from (pizza, pasta, potatoes...). According to this article, carb cycling actually helps build muscle without sacrificing leanness.

There are some major changes happening in my life now: Next week I will be flying to China, and from there to Seoul, South Korea for a student exchange. After that I’m planning to travel around Asia for about two months, so I won’t be back in Finland until late February 2011. I will also be without Internet access and laptop for a while now until I get settled in Seoul. I plan to keep writing from there as well, but I can’t say yet when I’ll be able to do that the next time.

Cheers!

How to attract women like a married man

Every now and then you hear guys talk about how it seems so difficult to find an interesting, clever, and a beautiful woman when they are single, but as soon as they start dating they become chick magnets and suddenly that kind of quality women are around every corner. On top of that, many of them seem to be attracted to these guys - something that was completely unheard of before! One moment you’re just another single guy trying to get the attention of a beautiful woman. Start dating, and you become magic.

The scarcity principle is one explanation; people are always more interested in things that seem unobtainable or rare. Then there is social proof; someone else has already done the screening for you. But how do you create the same effect without starting to date and consequently remove yourself from the marketplace?

Most guys do the mistake that they imagine their life would become somehow better when they introduce a woman to it. This presupposes that there is something wrong in their lives, or that something is missing. Their lives feel incomplete, and they imagine that a woman’s presence will fix it. This creates neediness and I think women can sense it when you interact with them - if not consciously, then at least in the more primitive parts of their brain.

So if you want to attract a beautiful, clever, and an interesting woman I’d say stop trying. Stop being just another guy who approaches her with nothing unique to offer. The reality of attractive women is that they get approached multiple times a day, and this becomes a bother. They’re not necessarily bitchy, but they need to develop ways to make snap judgements about the men who approach them, and be able to shrug them off in the blink of an eye.

Instead, think about your life. What do you value? What do you enjoy doing? What kind of life you want to be living in the next five years? Start systematically improving your life so that it becomes so enjoyable you don’t need a woman on it, or necessarily even have time for one. Doing this will cause few things to happen:

• You will have a lot more fun

• You are in control of the fun, it’s not dependent on anyone else

• You will stop projecting that air of neediness

• You will become seemingly unavailable, which makes you appear even more desirable

• Women will notice how much you enjoy your life and want to be part of it

Most importantly; a decision to involve a woman into your life will not be anymore about trying to fix something that is broken, but about making an already great life even more enjoyable.

You and your life, the whole package you have to offer to a woman is a product. How can you sell it if you don’t like what you’re selling in the first place?

The mechanics of gaining and losing fat, part 3

In the first part I talked about the shortcomings of conventional wisdom in what causes overweight and obesity. The second part was more focused on biochemistry and the reasons why carbohydrates and sugars are the most likely culprit. Now it’s time to put it all together and discuss what you can do to lose weight, gain better body composition, better health, and feel more energetic.

I strongly recommend reading at least the previous part before proceeding with this one. 

Diet

In the second part I made it pretty clear why sugars and dietary carbohydrates cause people to gain weight, so the solution for the diet part is rather simple:

Avoid dietary sugars and carbohydrates, as well as sugared drinks.

This act alone will greatly lower the amount of insulin in your bloodstream, and also cut down the triglyceride production - meaning that your body will have hard time storing fat. When glucose is not available for use as energy, your body will start releasing fatty acids from the adipose tissue into bloodstream, and starts using those as a preferred energy source.

We don't need dietary carbohydrates at all. Even the tissues and organs such as the brain which is said to require glucose can get its energy from ketone bodies. Those are produced in the liver from acetyl-CoA, which forms during the breakdown of fatty acids. Our bodies are also able to synthesize glucose from protein for the minuscule energy needs that might not be covered by ketone bodies.

In practice this means that your diet should consist mainly of fat and protein. Add in a mixture of fresh green vegetables and berries, as those are low in carbohydrates and sugars, and you can come up with tons of different kinds of meal plans: how about having an omelette for breakfast, a large bowl of salad and fish for lunch, a smoothie as an afternoon snack and a steak for dinner?

I've been following this kind of diet for over a year now without any issues. Quite the opposite, I've reduced my body fat from 22% to somewhere around 14%, reaching the point where my abs are clearly visible. I also feel a lot more energetic and focused than when I ate the normal "recommended" low-fat high-carbohydrate diet. 

Exercise

As mentioned in the earlier parts of this series, eating less and exercising more does not work. Mainly because the more you exercise, the hungrier you get as your body compensates for the increased energy expenditure.

Every time I go to gym there are overweight people desperately trying to get leaner by spending an hour on an exercise bike or crosstrainer and watching the heart rate monitor like hawks to ensure they stay on the "fat-burning zone". The problem with this approach is that it does nothing to change the underlying conditions which actually cause the body to accumulate fat.

As you know from the dietary part, the key is to avoid foods that raise insulin levels since insulin causes the body to store fat. When it comes to exercise, the focus should logically be on activities that mobilize those fat stores and increase your body's sensitivity to insulin. Remember, chronically elevated insulin levels are a result of insulin resistance, and whatever increases insulin sensitivity will help to cure that.

There is one hormone in particular that deserves special attention, and that is Human Growth Hormone (HGH):

• It causes muscle growth, mobilizes fat stores and shifts metabolism to burn fat, which results to an increase in lean body mass and decrease in body fat.

• It increases insulin sensitivity.

• It repairs tissue damage, which among other benefits helps your skin look better and more youthful.

• It strengthens the immune system.

• It strengthens joints.

• It increases bone density, which significantly decreases the risk of osteoporosis.

The first two benefits are the most important ones when it comes to staying fit. When your body releases growth hormone, it causes the adipose tissue to release fatty acids for fuel, and also increases your cells' sensitivity to insulin, fighting against insulin resistance.

We have plenty of growth hormone available as we grow in our early years, but upon reaching adulthood the growth hormone secretion diminishes. Luckily things can be done to better the situation. I have found two effective ways to cause the body to produce growth hormone in significant amounts. There may be more, but these are the ones I know to be working. 

Lift heavy things

In order for the body to secrete growth hormone, it must be stressed to its limits. This is best done by stressing the big muscle groups as it causes more growth hormone to be released than if you stress only specific smaller muscles such as the biceps.

The key here is to reach muscle failure. When you push your muscles to their limits, they actually develop microscopic tears. Your body will then release growth hormone to repair the inflicted tissue damage, and also to augment the damaged muscle, resulting in an increase in lean mass.

Now there are many different ways to approach this. In my current regime I do strength training once every 4-5 days, with a little bit different routine every other time.

Routine 1:

• Deadlifts (4 sets, aiming at 4-6 reps / set)

• Bench presses (4 sets, aiming at 4-6 reps / set)

• Leg presses (1 set for both legs separately, aiming at 10-15 reps / set)

• Squats (3 sets, aiming at 8-12 reps / set)

Routine 2:

• Shoulder presses (4 sets, aiming at 4-6 reps / set)

• Pull-ups (1 set, as many as I can)

• Bicep curls (2 sets, aiming at 4-6 reps / set )

• Dips (1 set, as many as I can)

• Leg presses (1 set for both legs separately, aiming at 10-15 reps / set)

• Squats (3 sets, aiming at 8-12 reps / set)

I aim to do all movements slowly and with good form. I normally have about 60-90 second break between sets, and a longer 3 minute break between different exercises - except in the Routine 2 where I do pull-ups, bicep curls, and dips with only 60-90 seconds in between.

Of the exercises mentioned above, I'd say that deadlifts, shoulder presses, and squats are the most important ones: Deadlift is probably the best overall body developer exercise, working all the major muscle groups. Shoulder presses strain not only your arms and shoulders, but also your back and torso. In squats the whole body is working as your legs do the actual movement, but at the same time your core muscles need to maintain proper upper body form.

I always start with the heaviest weight up front, lowering the amount of weight for each set as the muscles get more fatigued, and I always do as many repetitions as I possibly can. This ensures that I get to squeeze the last bits of strength I have and cause enough stress to send the signals for my body to start releasing growth hormone. Whenever I manage more than 6 reps with a specific weight, I increase the amount of weight the next time I go to the gym.

To summarize:

• Use enough weight to reach muscle failure (meaning you can't do any more reps)

• Focus on large muscle groups and compound movements

• Use full range of motion

• Good form and relaxed pace is better than speed

• Take adequate breaks between exercises - the point is not to do cardio, but to stress your muscles

Sprint

Another key exercise is sprints - meaning running as fast as you can! I have had knee problems for over 7 years now and I cannot run long distances without experiencing serious pain, but for some reason sprinting works for me. The added benefits are that sprinting is hell of a lot better from growth hormone point of view, and it's extremely efficient;it takes usually only about 30-40 minutes to finish this exercise, and that includes warming up and cooling down.

As with strength training, there are also variations in doing sprints. I used to do sprints in such a manner that I jogged for 30 seconds, ran for 30 seconds, jogged again for 30 seconds etc., repeating that for 15 times.

However, now I simply go to the beach or a park, jogging for about 10 minutes to warm up the muscles, and then running for 20-25 seconds like there's no tomorrow! I tend to have about one minute break between each sprint, repeating the whole thing 10-12 times and then jogging back home. I might also take couple minutes longer breaks after I've done 6 and 10 sprints. 

Rest

Taking a break is equally important to stressing your muscles: Too much stress and your body will start breaking down muscle tissue, whereas too little stress and you won't get into better shape. The key is to balance the two. This is the reason why I only go to gym once every 4-5 days, and won't do sprints more than once a week. The remainder of the days I either rest and recover, or do lighter exercise such as yoga or play squash.

Getting a good amount of sleep is vital. It's actually during the wee hours when you're asleep (or should be!) that your body secretes additional growth hormone and repairs those damaged muscles and other tissues.

This is it folks! I hope you've enjoyed the series and if I haven't convinced you to try out a different way of eating and exercising, then hopefully I've at least gotten you to question some of the conventional assumptions of what is healthy and what is not.

The mechanics of gaining and losing fat, part 2

In the first part I talked about the problems of conventional wisdom, and the energy balance hypothesis in overweight and obesity. Now it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of how our bodies actually work when it comes to storage and use of nutrients.

One thing missing from the conventional hypothesis (Change in weight = Calories IN - Calories OUT) is the arrow of causality. Even if we'd believe this formula to be correct, it doesn't tell us anything about what causes people to eat too much and expend too little of their energy. In this light, what should be said about obesity - and when I talk about obesity I'm talking about things that can be applied to any amount of overweight - is that it is a disorder of excess fat accumulation.

We don't assume that people eating too much and exercising too little results in obesity, and at this point we don't even say that specific foods such as saturated fats or sweets cause obesity. We're just saying, that something causes the fat tissue to store excessive amounts of fat in obese and overweight people.

When looked from this point of view, overeating is not a weakness of character and the "cure" is not to live our lives constantly battling hunger and the desire to eat. This starting point also allows us to ask different kinds of questions. One extremely important one that has been missing from the caloric balance hypothesis is; if obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation then what regulates fat accumulation?

The nutrient cycle

Before we get to the storage of fat, it's necessary to talk a bit about how our cells use food for energy. Basically the cells have two forms of fuel available; glucose and fatty acids (glycogen, the glucose stored in muscles for rapid need of energy is not relevant to this discussion). Our bodies first burn all available glucose for energy, and then fatty acids cover the rest.

What the body needs is a steady source of energy, and due to this after you eat 50-70% of that energy goes into the adipose tissue (body fat), from where it is then steadily released into the bloodstream as free fatty acids. Carbohydrates in food are converted into glucose and used as a primary source of fuel, but in the modern low-fat carbohydrate-rich diets this means that a significant portion of carbohydrates will also be stored as fat in adipose tissue.

The storage form of both glucose and fatty acids is a triglyceride, consisting of 3 fatty acids (tri) on a glycerol backbone (glyceride). Inside fat cells, triglycerides are continuously broken down and recomposed, releasing fatty acids into the bloodstream. This process ensures that there is a continuous supply of energy available for cells. Any excess fatty acids in the blood are converted again to triglycerides and shipped back to adipose tissue for storage.

How this system should be working is in a homeostasis, a dynamic equilibrium, where the flow of fatty acids in and out of fat cells works freely and the rest of our body is ensured a constant supply of fuel. When blood sugar (please note, that I am using the terms glucose and blood sugar interchangeably, as it's easier to understand) gets low, more fatty acids are released, and cells stop burning glucose in favor of fatty acids.

In this context, hunger is not a psychological phenomenon, but instead a physiological sign that the fuel supply for our cells is failing and more energy is needed. That's why we get hungrier after exercise and after a period of fasting, and that's why in reduced-calorie diets the body starts conserving energy. 

What drives fat accumulation?

I'll repeat it here because it's important: Fat is stored in the form of triglycerides. The glycerol molecules which form the backbone of triglycerides come from glycerol-3-phosphate, which is a byproduct of glucose metabolism. A small quantity of g-3-p is made via glyceroneogenesis in the fat tissue, but the primary source by far is dietary carbohydrates. The more there is glucose in fat cells, the more g-3-p is available, the more the body creates triglycerides, and the more the rate of fat deposition in adipose tissue increases.

In other words the arrow of causality would go like this: Carbohydrates > glucose > g-3-p > triglycerides > fattening. In fact, it is impossible to accumulate fat without the presence of g-3-p. This explains why overweight and obesity are non-existent in isolated populations such as the Inuit who rely solely on an all-meat diet, and why it has been impossible to inflict weight gain in experiments where excess calories have been fed to the test subjects without those excess calories coming from carbohydrates.

With a diet low on carbohydrates, there is less glucose for cells to burn, and thus less g-3-p to keep fatty acids bound up in the adipose tissue. 

The role of hormones

The caloric balance hypothesis states that people gain weight because they eat too much and exercise too little. However, in order for this to make at least some logical sense it is implied to apply only for the overweight people. Let me explain: By this logic a child who is growing year-by-year and thus gaining weight is considered to eat too much and exercise too little. It is also presupposed, that the child is gaining weight because she's eating too much, not for any other reason. But I doubt anyone would take this seriously. It's much more reasonable to say that the child is overeating because she is growing.

The important thing here is to notice the causality: The child is growing, therefore she overeats. Not the child overeats, therefore she is growing. And even if you put the child on a calorie restricted diet she will keep on growing. Not as much if she could eat freely, but she would grow nonetheless. The body would simply conserve energy elsewhere in order to fuel the growth. Same applies to pregnant women. If they don't eat enough their bodies conserve energy elsewhere in order to supply enough fuel for the growing fetus.

These processes are controlled by hormones, and the most important of them when it comes to accumulation of fat is insulin. The primary role of insulin is to direct the flow of glucose from blood into cells, for use as energy or storage as triglycerides. Therefore it can be said that insulin is also controlling fattening by causing the body to form more triglycerides.Another effect of insulin is that it inhibits fat cells from releasing free fatty acids into the bloodstream.

When the body works in harmony, or homeostasis, we would be getting a steady supply of energy from the food we eat. Our cells would first use glucose from the diet as energy, store the rest in adipose tissue, and then gradually release the stored energy as free fatty acids. In this model eating is followed by an increase in insulin levels, as a response to the carbohydrates in diet, driving fat accumulation. When all glucose from the bloodstream is either used for energy or stored, insulin levels would go down and the adipose tissue would then start releasing free fatty acids.

The real problem is that our bodies were not evolved to handle such high spikes in blood sugar that are common when eating modern diet high in sugar and carbohydrates. An increase in blood sugar is followed by an increase in insulin levels, and when this keeps going on for a long time cells start to become resistant to insulin, meaning that more and more insulin is needed to keep the blood sugars steady.

However, because fat tissue is extremely sensitive to insulin, muscles and other parts of our body start to lose their sensitivity - or become resistant - much sooner than the fat tissue. This causes less glucose to be used as fuel, and instead fat cells soak up all the excess blood sugar to prevent it from reaching toxic levels. Since insulin also inhibits the release of free fatty acids from fat tissue into the bloodstream, suddenly the body is in a situation where muscles and other tissues cannot use all the glucose in bloodstream for energy, more and more of it is being directed into the fat tissue for storage, and yet the fat tissue is not releasing its energy stores.

In this unbalanced situation when people are kept on calorie restricted diets, their fat deposits may actually be increasing even though the rest of their bodies are starving for energy: insulin directs the flow of nutrients into adipose tissue, and prevents them from being released back into the bloodstream. Now when all the glucose from the bloodstream is gone, irresistibly strong cravings for sweets occur as the body needs energy, but fat tissue is unable to release it.

This inability to release free fatty acids and therefore provide a steady supply of energy is a result of chronically elevated insulin levels, which is a result of insulin resistance. Both the obese and overweight people, as well as type II diabetics, all have elevated insulin levels. They also have a greatly exaggerated insulin response to dietary carbohydrates - meaning that their bodies secrete significantly more insulin when carbohydrates are consumed compared to a healthy person.

In this sense it is idiotic to the point of insanity to "treat" type II diabetics by giving them more insulin and recommending them to eat high-carbohydrate diets. This is yet another example of modern medicine treating a symptom, not the cause of the disorder. When type II diabetes patients are treated with insulin for up to 12 months, weight can be expected to go up by 2.0 - 4.5 kg. This weight gain then leads to the often-cited vicious cycle of increased insulin resistance, leading to the need for more exogenous insulin and to further weight gain, which increases the insulin resistance even more. 

Afterword

When it comes to the role of glycerol-3-phosphate in fat accumulation, or how insulin drives blood sugar into cells and inhibits the use of fatty acids for energy, and even the development of insulin resistance and obese people having chronically elevated insulin levels, none of this research is particularly controversial. Yet it is rejected out-of-hand in the mainstream obesity field. One reason - as I mentioned in the part 1 - is that so much has been invested in the current dogma that it's very difficult change course now. The other reason is that the field of medicine has become overspecialized, and most nutrition researchers do not have e.g. sufficient knowledge of biochemistry to see the necessary connections.

I originally thought this topic would be covered in two articles, but after writing all this I feel a third one is needed; one that puts together practical advice and what all this science talk actually means when it comes to losing weight and staying healthy. After all, obesity is just one part of metabolic syndrome which is also associated with cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's. All of which may have the same underlying cause described above.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more I'd recommend spending an hour to watch this lecture by Gary Taubes: Why we gain weight: Adiposity 101 and the Alternative Hypothesis of Obesity.

Another good resource is this website, where you can also find a summary of the major differences between the caloric balance hypothesis, and the one I just described above. 

It may be stated categorically that the storage of fat, and therefore the production and maintenance of obesity, cannot take place unless glucose is being metabolized. Since glucose cannot be used by most tissues without the presence of insulin, it may also be stated categorically that obesity is impossible in the absence of adequate tissue concentrations of insulin... Thus an abundant supply of carbohydrate food exerts a powerful influence in directing the stream of glucose metabolism into lipogenesis, whereas a relatively low carbohydrate intake tends to minimize the storage of fat.
- Edgar Gordon, JAMA, 1963

The mechanics of gaining and losing fat, part 1

When I wrote my original post about weight loss I didn't want to go into too much of the specifics of why eating a low-carbohydrate high-fat diet works. I did mention blood sugars, their effect on insulin, and gave reasons why it's vitally important to control the insulin levels.However, I purposefully didn't go into the very specifics of how fat accumulation works. It's time to change that.

This article wouldn't be possible without the brilliant Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, who spent five years studying medical literature and research related to metabolism, nutrition, and obesity starting from mid 1800s. He then summarized his findings into one book that covers the journey of how this field of science has evolved, and how we ended up from very controversial hypotheses to government-enforced nutritional guidelines.

In this first part I'll focus more on the conventional wisdom and its shortcomings in explaining why people become overweight. I hope you enjoy the ride! 

The role of thermodynamics

We have become obsessed with calories. Eat less, exercise more and the weight is supposed to melt away. This makes logical sense, doesn't it? How could you even possibly become overweight if you eat less than your body consumes? The basal metabolic rate (meaning how much your body consumes energy at rest) for most men is around 1900 kcal/day range, whereas for women it's maybe 200 kcal/day less. So munching more than 2000 kcal/day while doing little to no exercise would mean you become fatter, whereas on the other end of the spectrum if you exercise well and keep the caloric intake below, say 1600 kcal/day, you should be losing weight.

The formula for this caloric balance hypothesis is as follows: 

Change in weight = Calories IN - Calories OUT

If Calories IN is more than Calories OUT, then an increase in weight ensues. Whereas if Calories OUT outweigh Calories IN, then one should be losing weight. The fundamental principle behind this thinking is the First Law of Thermodynamics.

The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another. From the perspective of weight gain this means that the excess calories you ingest will be either stored as fat, or dissipated as heat through thermogenesis. It doesn't matter if those calories come from fat, protein, or carbohydrates, you cannot avoid the laws of thermodynamics.

A fundamental flaw in this thinking, however, is that the first law is valid only in closed systems, and we happen to live on planet Earth, not in an isolated box. A human organism is:

1. Not in thermal equilibrium with its environment (our body temperature is not the same as the temperature around us).

2. Capable of significant mass flows (e.g. respiration).

3. Capable of sequestering entropy (e.g. protein synthesis).

In other words, the first law does not tell whether or not excess calories will be stored as fat. If it held true, wearing sweaters would make us fat as it would reduce our bodies' need to produce heat, and thus reduce the total energy expenditure. The above thinking would also imply that we consume calories for the sole purpose of generating heat, rather than e.g. breathing, using our muscles, digestion etc. In reality heat is a waste product of our normal metabolic functions.

Another fundamental problem in this caloric balance theory is that it assumes that Calories IN and Calories OUT are independent variables. This means that if your basal metabolism is 1800 kcals/day and you eat 1600 kcals/day you'd be losing weight since your Calories OUT part is higher than the Calories IN part. However, in reality when you reduce the Calories IN, the Calories OUT decreases as well. Eat less and your body will also consume less energy.

Perhaps the significance of this becomes more evident when presented the other way around;if your Calories IN part is more than your basal metabolism, your body will also compensate on that andincrease its energy expenditure. Another result of this compensation mechanism is that if you increase Calories OUT by for example exercising, you will become more hungry and need to eat more to satisfy your appetite.

So if you eat too much and your body will increase energy expenditure to compensate for it, then why do people become overweight? I'm afraid you need to wait until my next post to find the answer. 

How it all went wrong

Those of us born after the 60's probably are not aware of the starting point of the low-fat craze. So would it surprise you to know that the low-fat thinking didn't become mainstream until 1970's? Before the Second World War it was public knowledge that carbohydrates, and especially sugars, are fattening.

In the 1970's the US government started publicly announcing that low-fat high-carbohydrate diet is good for you, and that you should be especially worried about saturated fat intake. However, there has never been conclusive evidence that would support the dogma of low-fat diets being healthy. Since the 1970's hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on studies trying to prove this hypothesis, but to no avail.

In science hypotheses are tested by performing experiments. The results of an experiment are then evaluated in light of the hypothesis under scrutiny, either confirming the hypothesis or disproving it entirely or partially. Even if the results of an experiment contradict a hypothesis, it does not necessarily mean that the hypothesis should be discarded as wrong. Our ability to perform experiments is limited by conditions such as technology, time, and resources which all affect the reliability of the results.

However, when a hypothesis is being tested over and over again by numerous researchers, and in numerous experiments, while the research results consistently give inconclusive evidence in light of the hypothesis, it should be time to re-evaluate the hypothesis itself. In the field of nutrition, health, and obesity research this has not been the case.

One of the underlying problems is that governments have become so invested in the low-fat belief that it is very difficult to get funding for research that would, in essence, aim to disprove or at least challenge the current national dietary recommendations. 

Problems with the caloric balance hypothesis

In addition to research having failed to prove the caloric balance hypothesis, the hypothesis itself has other major shortcomings. It does not provide any explanation to the following facts.

If the caloric balance hypothesis was true, then:

• Why is obesity more common amongst the poor people? After all, they work more physically demanding jobs than the more affluent and consequently their energy expenditure is also higher.

• How is it possible that a person engaged in heavy physical labor and eating significantly less than 2000 kcals/day may grow obese?

• How come in fattening experiments where two people eat e.g. 1000 kcals/day more than they need to maintain their weight, for weeks on end, one barely adds a pound of fat while the other puts on nearly ten (note: this alone indicates that there is something else involved than simply caloric balance)?

• Why do the fat stay fat and the lean stay lean, when obesity research shows that both groups of people are eating on average the same amount of food?

In the second part of the series I will focus on explaining more in detail what happens inside our bodies, how our cells use energy, how fat stores are mobilized, and why the key to unlock this mystery lies in a hormone called insulin.

The urge to simplify a complex scientific situation so that physicians can apply it and their patients and the public embrace it has taken precedence over the scientific obligation of presenting the evidence with relentless honesty. The result is an enormous enterprise dedicated in theory to determining the relationship between diet, obesity, and disease, while dedicated in practice to convincing everyone involved, and the lay public, most of all, that the answers are already known and always have been - an enterprise, in other words, that purports to be a science and yet functions like a religion.
- Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories

Thoughts, ideas, and freeing your mind

It has been a long time since my last article. I have found excuses to keep me from writing, afraid that I wouldn't have anything to say. But each journey begins with the first step, and for me the first step seems to be the most difficult one to take. After that my mind starts to work on its own and words flow through my fingertips. I hope you enjoy my incoherent ramblings! 

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
- Bob Marley

Thoughts have power, moreso when followed by action. And action is rarely present without the thought. You don't just get out of bed in the morning and go to work like a robot who has no say on what it's programmed to do. You think about what needs to be done before leaving the house, and you may even stop to think why you are going to work. Maybe you're saving money for a vacation, or maybe you feel like you are helping to make the world a better place through what you do for a living. In any case, you did not just end up where you are, but you rather got there as the end result of countless actions; actions preceded by thoughts.

Thoughts have power to manifest themselves in physical reality. The Wright brothers thought that a flying machine can be created. They believed it to be possible, even though the idea seemed ridiculous to others. But then again, it was the Wright brothers who created the world's first airplane. It was not someone who thought it couldn't be done.

Edison thought that it is possible to create light in a controllable way with electricity. He believed it so much that he famously invented 10 000 ways how to not create light before coming up with the lightbulb. What if he would have quitted? What if he would have buried his head in his hands in defeat, saying that "it is not possible" and fully embraced that thought?

Edison's lightbulb and the airplane of the Wright brothers did not exist in observable reality. They were literally born out of intangible ideas, and by taking action these men were able to turn their ideas into physical reality. Ideas and thoughts behind these inventions existed before their physical manifestations.

Our thoughts, beliefs, and how we see our relationship with the outside world provide a framework through which we operate. And our belief in what is possible and what isn't is a direct result of how that framework is built. For many people that framework was structured in a way that prevented them from even thinking about the possibility of a human being walking on the moon. But there were some with different frameworks. Some people thought it could be done, and believed in it, and it became reality.

Here is the kicker: that framework has your mind on a short leash. Since childhood that framework has been built in a way that certain things are taken for granted; as a truth that should never be questioned. This has lead most people to succumb to the notion that life is a fixed pattern of birth-childhood-school-work-retirement-death, and as a result they aren't able to see it for what it is: just another idea.

Consumerism is another example. It has become such an ingrained part of our thinking of how life should be that most people keep on creating artificial wants and needs; they buy this and that in pursuit of fleeting moments of happiness and excitement. I don't think many of them have stopped to question the origin or motives of this kind of behavior.

How the culture or the society wants us to live our lives is not a physical object that you can touch and observe. It is something that has gotten into our minds already at an early age, and then entangled itself to the framework. After you realize that these are just ideas, you begin to see you don't need to act upon them unless that is what you truly want.

This is what seeing things differently means. You can dismantle the framework that other people take for granted, and identify where it serves your purpose and where it is better to be reshaped or torn down altogether.

If you adopt this mindset you start to notice some interesting things around you. Take manners as an example: What we consider to be 'good manners' is simply one kind of behavior among other behaviors. That behavior in itself does not carry any value or any notion of 'good' and 'bad'. It is the framework in our heads that provides the context through which we observe and judge whether a certain behavior fits inside our concept of 'good' or 'bad' manners.

I think here lies the essence of an entrepreneur. They are, by definition, people who have an ability to question things that others take for granted, see them differently, and evaluate their worth. They are not limited by what others think can or can't be done. They have the ability to decide for themselves which behaviors provide value and which ones are better to get rid of.

For most people the framework is a master who needs to be obeyed. For entrepreneurs and other creative minds the framework is a tool. And if that tool is wrong for the purpose or task at hand, it needs to be changed.

In which group you belong to?

The stories no one tells you

Have you heard how sometimes a drowning man, or a survivor of a shipwreck, has been helped ashore by a dolphin? This kinds of things come up in the news every now and then. Are they proof that dolphins are intelligent and benevolent? Do dolphins know that by doing this they are saving a human life? Or are they just being playful?

Photo by ladybugbkt

And what about the times when the dolphins ignore a struggling swimmer and let him drown? Or start towing or pushing him to the open sea instead of land? We never hear about these stories. It doesn't mean they wouldn't happen, but there's no one alive to tell them. Maybe a dolphin is just being playful, pushing and pulling the drowning man to wherever. The stories we hear are told by those who were lucky enough to be pushed ashore and lived to share their experience, and this distorts our perspective on reality. We are inclined to think that dolphins are benevolent creatures.

I was reading this article by Everett Bogue about becoming successful by setting unrealistic goals and I realized that many of the blogs I read are written by people who are making their income online with an illusory ease. In the process they seem to have achieved freedom, happiness, and financial security - and all of them are saying that you can do it too! This is connected with personal development, as the process involves shedding many of your limiting beliefs and learning things about yourself. These people make it sound so easy even when they say it isn't.

Don't get me wrong, I admire what these people have done, but similar to the drowning man saved by a dolphin, are we only hearing one side of the story? I don't know of any bloggers who are focusing only on their failures and how difficult it is to become successful in your chosen trade. In fact, I don't even think people want to read about this stuff. It's much nicer to read 'from rags to riches' kinds of stories. They give hope.

The few times I've seen people blog about where they failed the articles have always included very profound analysis and soul-searching to figure out what went wrong and how to learn from it, so I wouldn't consider these failures in that sense. The best way to learn is to try and fail and try again.

Humans have a tendency to wrongly estimate the likelihood of different events to occur. The more first-hand evidence we see about specific things the more common we assume them to be. This is why it's normal for a layman to grossly overestimate homicide rates. These events always make it to the newspaper and TV headlines so people are much more exposed to them than e.g. deaths caused by heart disease.

In a similar way I've begun to wonder if the number of lifestyle design, personal development, and online marketing blogs is skewing the actual data. Maybe these successful bloggers are just a dime in the dozens of failures, but because it's very rare to hear about those failures we assume that achieving what these people have achieved is somehow easy and commonplace.

What do you think?

Diet, cholesterol, and heart disease

I tweeted recently about making a new personal record as I ate altogether 7 boiled eggs in one day; three for breakfast and four with dinner consisting of salad, lentils, and salmon. Apparently this raised some questions about my cholesterol levels, and since it's been a while since I wrote anything about nutrition and health, I thought it would be a good time to clear some confusion surrounding this topic.

Coincidentally, I'm also reading Gary Taubes's Good Calories, Bad Calories and just finished a section about cholesterol. If you've read my earlier posts about nutrition and weight loss but doubt the science behind them, I really recommend getting a copy of this book. It's rather heavy to read, but gives a thorough overview about the science and research in the field of nutrition over the past 100 years. Things are not as black and white as we've been led to believe.

Most people think that cholesterol is the stuff that clogs arteries, causing heart attacks and stroke. Due to this it's also commonly believed that avoiding cholesterol rich foods such as eggs will keep you healthier. However, the truth is far more complex than that.

First of all, cholesterol is absolutely vital for life. Cholesterol molecules are the building blocks of cell membranes. Without cholesterol our cells would not be able to maintain their form. The cells in our bodies are continuously dying and born again in a cycle of life, but if we would somehow remove cholesterol the cycle would end, and so would our own existence.

In fact, cholesterol is so vitally important that only a minor portion of it is from the food we eat. Around 80% of the cholesterol in our bloodstream is synthesized by our own bodies, and in a healthy person it is a self-regulating mechanism; the more you eat cholesterol rich foods, the less your body produces it in order to maintain balance.

Now this is the point where it gets more technical, so let's get couple terms out of the way first:

• Triglycerides and free fatty acids are the molecular forms in which fat is found circulating in the bloodstream.

• Cholesterol is only one of several fat-like substances, which are collectively known as blood lipids.

• Both cholesterol and triglycerides are transported in our blood in particles called lipoproteins, and the amount of cholesterol and triglycerides varies in each type of lipoprotein.

You may have heard about the so-called 'good' and 'bad' cholesterol, or HDL and LDL. These are actually lipoproteins that have been distributed into categories based on their densities. HDL stands for high-density lipoprotein, whereas LDL is low-density lipoprotein. A third commonly used category is VLDL, or very low-density lipoprotein.

Usually when your cholesterol is measured in a standard health checkup, it will only show the concentrations of HDL and LDL. This is not because the other particles wouldn't be physiologically important, but because more detailed measures require different equipment and are, simply put, more expensive to perform. The problem is that focusing only on LDL and HDL levels results into an oversimplification of the underlying science.

Seven different subclasses of LDL have been identified, and each of them vary in density and size. This is why heart disease sufferers may have only a few percentage points higher concentration of LDL cholesterol in average, compared to those without heart disease: the size and density of LDL particles is a more significant risk factor than the total concentration of LDL. Especially the amount of smallest and densest of LDL particles have been found to correlate with risk of heart disease much more than the overall levels of LDL cholesterol.

I understand if you find this article difficult to read and follow. I've had my own problems trying to understand these concepts, but here's something really important to take away from reading this: focusing on overall cholesterol levels will not help you stay healthy. You may even lower your 'bad' LDL cholesterol but if it means that more of it will be packaged in small, dense LDL particles your risk of heart disease will actually become higher. It also works the other way around: You may have high LDL cholesterol but when it's in the form of large, fluffy particles your heart disease risk is significantly lower.

If your doctor says you should take some form of cholesterol lowering drug, I would be adamant about getting thorough measurements of your blood lipids, not just LDL and HDL, before agreeing on any treatment.

As explained above, finding out your LDL levels will not help much in determining whether or not you have a high risk of heart disease. Luckily HDL is a somewhat better indicator: It has been discovered that HDL has a strong inverse correlation with the amount of smallest and densest of low-density lipoproteins. In other words, if you have high HDL levels - and even if your overall cholesterol is high - it would mean that most of your LDL is in the form of harmless large and fluffy particles.

Diet and cholesterol

Considering the lipoproteins, an optimal diet would increase HDL and decrease LDL, while also ensuring that the LDL in bloodstream consists of the large and fluffy particles (remember, that an increase in HDL alone can be an indicator that the LDL particle size is of the harmless kind). One of the reasons why a low-fat diet is assumed healthy is that it lowers overall cholesterol. What is left out is that in the process of doing so, a low-fat diet actually increases the amounts of smallest and densest of LDL, resulting in a higher risk of heart disease.

According to Good Calories, Bad Calories, eating an "average American diet" with 35% of calories from fat, one in three men have a risk of heart disease. When the amount of fat is increased to 46%, only one in five are in the risk group. If, on the other hand, we look at a more extreme low-fat diet with only 10% of calories from fat, the risk of heart disease becomes three times higher.

Conventional wisdom says that we should eat less fat and more complex carbohydrates. In order to stay satiated this usually means replacing the fat calories with carbs. However, it is precisely the increase in carbohydrate consumption and decrease in fat consumption that lowers both LDL and HDL, indicating a shift towards the harmful small and dense LDL particles in the bloodstream.

Fats, on the other hand, behave differently: Saturated fats raise both HDL and LDL cholesterol, monounsaturated fats both lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL, and polyunsaturated fats lower LDL cholesterol but have no meaningful effect on HDL.

Now let's take a look at those 7 eggs I had, and meat in general: The principal fat in meat is monounsaturated and most of that is oleic acid, which is the same stuff found in olive oil. A large portion of the saturated fat is stearic acid, which increases HDL and has no effect on LDL. Lastly, a very minor portion of the fat is polyunsaturated, lowering LDL.

For example (and once again referring to Good Calories, Bad Calories), in a porterhouse steak with a quarter-inch layer of fat about 70% of it will improve the relative levels of LDL and HDL cholesterol, compared with what they would be if carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed. The remaining 30% will raise both LDL and HDL cholesterol, having an insignificant effect, if any, on the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL.

So, I will happily enjoy my eggs in the future as well, and so should you :)

Creating a clean slate

The past two months have been hectic to say the least. I've been doing more courses in the university than during the fall, and I also started a new work project which actually turned out to take quite a lot of my time and energy. I'm doing things that are entirely new to me such as detailed project planning and resourcing. Factor in a new relationship and the end result has been an almost complete neglect to my own personal growth, which resulted in a slight depression.

During these couple of months I've learned something new, though. This is probably the first time ever when I have had so many promising opportunities that I simply can't get involved in all of them. I had to start prioritizing and actually refuse from things which is definitely something that doesn't come naturally to me.

Because of the standstill in my personal growth I have felt that I'm not moving forward, that I'm not evolving, and as a result I felt like I had betrayed myself and wasn't living up to my own standards. I also learned that this blog and my personal growth are very much intertwined. Without new profound realizations and discoveries in my own life it feels like I don't have enough interesting things to write about.

It's great to be able to plow through obstructions and get the job done. And it's good to keep yourself disciplined and on purpose. But if you forget your larger purpose while pursuing the small and endless tasks of daily life, then you have reduced yourself to a machine of picayune... Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness. You cannot do enough, nor can you do the right things, so that you will finally feel complete.
- David Deida: The Way of the Superior Man 

I'm sure no one wants to hear about the intricacies of my work as an SAP specialist, or what I'm learning at the university - which quite frankly isn't all that much. School and work really are not the places where you learn things about yourself, about what your wants and desires are, or how to discover your place and purpose in the world.

I wanted to empty myself of my commitments, obligations, duties, and wants in order to see them objectively and pick the ones that are most important. Applying Pareto principle, I wanted to find out the 20% of things that give me 80% satisfaction. Call it prioritizing or mental spring cleaning, but after I realized I needed to do this it felt like a huge burden was lifted from my shoulders. This is the list I came up with. 

Highest priority commitments

Currently my number one goal is to do a student exchange in Seoul, South Korea next fall. I should know in two weeks whether or not I get accepted but I'm having my hopes high. I also want to graduate some day, so right now I'd say the two commitments I really feel obliged to keep are

• School

  • Getting more courses done this spring so I'm a step closer to graduating.

• Work

  • Saving money for the student exchange.

I was losing money the whole fall due to not having enough work, but to my big relief that changed now in mid-January. It also looks like I'm able to work throughout the summer and save money for the exchange. I'm having a new kind of project role at work which gives me more responsibility than before, so I'm also taking it as a challenge and a learning experience. 

Other high priority stuff

These are the things I enjoy a lot, or are otherwise the ones that are giving biggest dividends for the time I invest in them.

• Physical fitness

  • Going to gym, doing yoga, running after the snows melt, playing squash etc.

• Diet and nutrition

  • Making sure that I keep eating healthy, which involves preparing most of my own food.

  • Taking care of what I eat and how I exercise gives so much energy that they are more like enablers that make it possible to tackle all the rest of the things going on in my life.

• Relationship

  • I started dating a lovely girl about two months ago, and this relationship is something I really want to invest in and explore more :)

• Friends

  • The people you spend time with will shape your own personality. One of the fundamental success principles is to surround yourself with people who are forward looking and have a drive to succeed in life. Their energy will enhance your own. There are some extremely wonderful people in my life, and I want to keep it that way :)

• Language learning

  • Don't ask why, but I wanted to do a student exchange in a country where English is not so commonly spoken. This is because I want to learn a new language and I figured it's much easier to stay motivated when you are actually going to need it every single day. So yeah, as soon as I get confirmation about South Korea, I'll start studying the language lifehacking style.

• Personal growth

  • As I said, this area of my life has been on a standstill for the past couple of months. Only this week was I able to do something new regarding it, and it's amazing how much energy the experience gave me. I felt again that I'm moving towards some larger goal in my life. For me reading is an integral part of personal growth, so I will not mention it separately.

There are actually quite a lot of these high priority things that I want to keep in my life and juggling all of them might be a bit of a challenge. I don't know how things will turn out, but these are the ones I will try to devote my free time to. 

The rest

This category includes things that I will do if I have time left from my other activities. The main reason to write them down and have mentioned here is to stop myself from feeling obligated to do them. I want to be free of them, and enjoy them only when and if it fits my schedule.

• Aalto Entrepreneurship Society

  • It pains me to not be able to commit more to being an active member of the society, because Aaltoes is doing amazing job in aggregating entrepreneurship in Finland.

• Blogging

  • Even though I enjoy writing a lot, I've realized that I shouldn't force myself to do it, at least when doing so does nothing but makes me more stressful. I will keep writing new blog posts in the future as well, but I'm stopping myself from being committed to the earlier once a week schedule.

• Developing business ideas

  • I am starting to seriously consider becoming an entrepreneur, and I have quite a few different business ideas to get started with. However, I feel that this is something I can also focus on later after I have done my student exchange.

There are a few other existing and emerging short-term opportunities in my life, and I try to keep what I have promised to deliver earlier. I don't want to prevent myself from accepting possible new challenges either, but I think I have to start acknowledging that I can't do everything, and to become rather critical about what I should commit myself into.

This exercise was first and foremost to help me regain some control over my own life and to figure out what I really want to do with the limited time I have. If you have done something alike or have a completely different method I'd love to hear about it!

Confessions of a WoW addict

World of Warcraft (WoW) came out in Europe in February 2005. I started playing it a month earlier during the final beta test phase, and I kept playing it for about four years straight - except when I was doing my student exchange in Malaysia in 2006. However, even at that time I was eagerly looking forward to the first big expansion (The Burning Crusade) to come out, and I was following WoW news sites and watching WoW videos created by other gamers.

All in all, I was rather hardcore about the whole thing: I was the founder and leader of one of the best guilds - a group of players organized to work together - on the server in which I played. Eventually we merged with another guild so we could achieve more together, and we did. We became the first ones on the whole server to beat most of the toughest opponents in the game. I also wanted to give up my position as a leader because it got simply too tiring to run the whole thing and to deal with egomaniacs, who for some reason seem to be particularly attracted to multiplayer online games...

What finally stopped me playing WoW for good is actually rather embarrassing. In the end of 2008 I was becoming more and more fed up with the game. I had graduated a year and a half earlier and was working full-time. What I didn't want was to come home after work and play a game that started to feel like work, too. I felt obliged to play it. Then I finally realized after a period of denial that I was not getting any enjoyment out of it anymore, but instead it was making me anxious and frustrated.

I figured that I might enjoy certain aspects of the game (mainly player vs. player combat, in which the players fight against each other in teams instead of trying to beat the computer controlled opponents) if only I had a different character class. At the time of writing there are 10 different classes one can choose from, with each having unique abilities and a different "role" to play: some are good at dealing damage, while some heal others or are able to withstand damage. All characters also have a host of supporting, more situational abilities. Unfortunately the one I played at the time was a definite underdog in player vs. player combat, which was one of the reasons for my frustration with the game.

Given my skills and knowledge of the game, it would have taken me about 9 days - meaning 9x24 hours of actual playtime - to create a new character and reach a level in which I might have enjoyed playing WoW again. However, I didn't feel like going through the whole process of leveling up another character, so instead I paid a company to do it for me. Considering how much money I made at the time, it felt like a good deal. The only problem was that it's against WoW's terms of use and I got caught, losing my entire game account. That was the end for me, and I didn't mind! In retrospect, paying some $99 to get rid of one of the worst addictions that I've ever had is not a bad deal.

After I stopped playing, I started to really realize just how huge time-sucking vacuum the game is. As I put WoW behind me I shifted my focus on other things, took the concept of character development - where you play your character in the game and develop its skills, get better equipment and more abilities - and started applying it to myself. I began developing my skills and abilities for real: I read books and blogs to acquire knowledge, and I fixed my diet and exercise habits to become fit.

Ever since I stopped playing the game and started to focus on the real me instead, I've been pondering why is it that these kinds of games are so addictive? How come there are people so immersed in playing them, that they even forget to eat and sleep?

First of all, I don't think many people get to really experience feelings of success or accomplishment in their daily lives. We tend to move through our existence in mindless drudgery; wake up in the morning, go to work or school, and for the rest of the time try to keep ourselves entertained. And I think here is the key: why bother trying to achieve something big and meaningful, when it's safe and secure to live a dull life and grasp moments of instant gratification by watching tv and playing video games?

This is what we've been conditioned to do since we were kids. We've been lulled into settling for this safe and secure life which doesn't provide opportunities for personal growth, and we rarely even know how to look for those opportunities. After all, personal growth is a scary thing to do. It means facing and really getting to know yourself, your own shortcomings, your desires, and accepting and embracing them. It means getting out of your comfort zone and putting your psyche in the line of fire; something will change or shift and you will not be the same person as you were before. Something dies, and something is born anew.

A lot of adults are living their lives in a state of continuing adolescence. There's no need to really take responsibility. You can forget about the feeling of incompleteness - why you might be unhappy or feel like your life has very little meaning - by simply turning on the TV or logging into an online game where you can be the hero; destroyer of evil and protector of good! But what if we didn't have television? What if we didn't have computer games or Internet? How would you then spend your time? What would you do to get your buzz? To feel like you've accomplished something?

It's not only the feeling of achieving something that makes online games addictive. There is the social aspect as well.The game world has its own rules and measures of success - for example in WoW being able to beat a tough opponent before anyone else in the game is a source of pride and prestige. There are competitive aspects beneath the surface, and I happen to be a rather competitive person by nature, so for me it became important to be one of the best in the game - and I ended up playing a lot to get to that point.

In offline games it doesn't matter so much how well you play because similar social aspects and competitiveness are missing, but online you want to show the others just how good you are and how much you have achieved. Like I said, in that world you can be the hero. You can be someone.

The problem is that you are someone only as long as you play the game. Outside people don't know about your achievements in the game world. Outside there are different rules and different measures of success. So when you are not playing the game anymore you may not have much to celebrate. I feel like I was in a limbo for the two years when I played WoW intensely. I feel like my life was on hold; I was just doing my work, and then spent the rest of my time immersed in the game world.

But I guess you can cheat yourself only long enough before reality kicks in - and when it does, it does it hard. Then you stop and think "What the hell am I doing... Is this how I want to spend my limited time on the face of the Earth?"

I think a big difference between achieving things in the real world and in these online games is that in the games there is a much more limited set of rules, and the games are designed in a way that everyone can feel like the hero of the day. You know from the get-go what you need to do to progress, and the more you progress the better you feel. A bond is born between the real you and your avatar in the game world.

Life, on the other hand, is not so simple and we've been receiving mixed signals since we were kids about what we should do and have to feel happy. We've been conditioned to believe that education, good job, house, car, marriage, and children is what life's all about, but there are numerous people who have all that and yet they are miserable. So maybe we've been lied to. Maybe there is something else that will make you feel like your life has a purpose, a meaning, or a direction and that you are being congruent to that purpose and living it.

Finding that purpose is by no means an easy task. And there is no Gandalf that will come and tell you that you need to pack your things, travel to Mordor, and throw The One Ring into the Mount Doom. You can read every self-help book there is, which will likely provide you with good tools, butin the end you're still on your own when it comes to figuring out what your life will be about.

In the game world you know all the time what you should be doing to get to the next level, but in real life you don't. In the game world you have a direction where you're heading to and you know where it will take you. In real life it's much more difficult to find something even remotely like that and you can never be sure where you will end up, or what surprises are in store for you.

Now, what if you knew yourself well enough to realize what you want to achieve in life? What if you had a grand vision you know would benefit the rest of the humanity and make you feel like your life has meaning? And what if there was a system, or a toolset that provides you with a sense of direction, telling you what steps you need to take and what you need to do to get closer to your grand vision? What if - in the same way you're guided through the game world - you could receive similar guidance in real life enabling you to realize your potential?

Wouldn't that be something!

Managing stress... and sucking at it!

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
- Matthew 6:34

I am not a religious person. In fact I've been jokingly telling my friends that if I had a religion it would have to be Dudeism, and even that only so I would be able to marry couples. I think that would be cool.

Luckily you don't have to be religious to find wisdom in religious texts, and I think the quote above is a very important one to keep in mind. I am a worrier by nature. If I have many things that need to be done, they start to accumulate in my head and I find it more and more difficult to focus on actually doing them. I become stressful and I feel like I'm not getting anything done, even though in reality I am probably working harder than ever to meet my obligations.

I am good at dealing with stress. Or so it used to say in my CV. I actually thought it was true, but my current situation of working most of the week, dealing with university courses, and trying to keep my other commitments such as writing this blog have proved otherwise. I suck at dealing with stress. Having one or two big things to do is perfectly fine, but when the small ones start to accumulate on top of those, I am in trouble. I find it genuinely difficult to put them in order and deal with them without letting them gain power over me.

The problem is not so much that I wouldn't be able to deliver what I've committed to, but the process of doing it drains all the juice out of me and I end up feeling miserable until most of the things are out of the way.

People who know me tend to see me as someone who is very focused and constantly getting a lot of things done, but that's not the way I see myself. My attention is not on what I did, but what is still left to be done and that is a problem. Instead of stopping to celebrate the things I've accomplished I'm already striving towards the next thing on my list.

I could use some help here, and that's the main reason I'm writing this. I'm not a big fan of productivity systems that are complex and difficult to maintain, but I think I could use something to organize my thoughts and help me visually arrange the things I need to do. I have a tendency of committing myself into doing things even though I know I'm already busy with other stuff, so something that would help me see my current commitments and evaluate how much time it takes to do them would be perfect. If you have any ideas on this, I'd love hear them!

Now, I don't want this post to be all about bitching and whining, so here are couple things I've actually found very useful to make an active and busy life a lot more tolerable:

1. Write stuff down, even the small tasks.

If you try to keep everything in your head, these things will be popping up into your thoughts constantly to remind you that they need your attention. This will destroy focus, increase stress, and is just plain annoying.

2. Have an off-day once a week.

Doing this has worked great for me! Even with many things going on, forcing yourself to have one day a week when being productive and getting things done is banned from your vocabulary is a great stress relief. It might take a while to learn to do it as you need to consciously refuse to let your work and other commitments get inside your head. In long-term, though, this is very useful as it ensures that you have more focus and energy for the other six days.

3. Take care of eating, sleeping, and exercise.

Stress releases cortisol, which is a hormone that acts like insulin; driving glucose from blood into your cells to be used for energy or stored as fat. This is all fine and a natural survival mechanism as long as the cause of stress is short, but if you are experiencing chronic long-term stress you're in trouble. Sleep is important for stress release, and proper diet and exercise will improve your insulin sensitivity. These factors help you to maintain blood sugars at an optimum level, which brings numerous health benefits both physically and mentally.

I pretty much despise companies that track working hours of their employees and pay salary according to them. Counting time instead of actual results is a ghost of the industrial era and mass production. If the role of the employee is even a little more than that of an organic robot, time starts to lose its meaning.

If you're feeling stressed, low on energy, and lack focus, it might easily take 2-3 times longer to do a task than if you were super focused and completely immersed in it. Letting yourself take a day off and taking care of your health will help you reach that level of focus for the rest of the week. Even though you lose the hours of the off-day, you will end up getting more done in all the other days. And you are likely to feel better too.

On another note, I wrote an article for Lateral Action - one of my favorite blogs - about using your naturally occurring bodily rhythms to boost focus, energy levels, and consequently productivity. If the topic is of any interest to you, it's definitely worth checking out!

How to use reframing to destroy a limiting belief

I think the topic of liming beliefs falls into "personal development basics," so to speak, but it is something that's useful to think about every now and then. It's also a topic I have never written about before, so hopefully it will be of interest to you :)

Now, what exactly is a limiting belief? Let's start with some examples:

• I love photography but I'm never going to be good enough to make it for living.

• It's always someone rich and famous who gets the kind of girl/guy I want.

• I was bullied as a kid which made me an introvert, and because of that I can never become successful in relationships.

• I am not smart enough to do well in business.

• I would love to write a book, but I don't have the talent/patience/creativity.

• My kids don't respect me because I don't have a well-paying job.

• Women/men don't like me because I'm fat.

• I'm overweight because of my genes, so I can never become fit.

As I've written before, our interpretation of the world and what happens around us is largely based on our beliefs. These beliefs can be roughly divided into two groups; positive and negative, or enabling and limiting. It's the negative, limiting beliefs that prevent us from achieving what we want in life, whereas the positive, enabling beliefs support us when we're reaching for our goals.

If you have a limiting belief that "you're not smart enough to do well in business" - even if you would say it modestly and still think you're pretty clever - it will inevitably affect your unconscious mind and how you behave. The only job of a belief is to prove itself true, and if you keep hammering that kind of belief into your head, sooner or later you will start to act according to it. Worse are of course the limiting beliefs that you really deep down know to be true.

It's worth to consider for a while where these limiting beliefs come from. I would say that there are roughly two sources; external influences and inner reasoning. By external influences I mean situations where a limiting belief is imprinted on us by outside forces, and by inner reasoning I mean our own thought processes; how we seek to understand, interpret, and explain events that happen around us, and consequently create beliefs on how the world works.

The external influence can be something our friends or parents have led us to believe, such as "You can't get a good job unless you get a university degree." We're also continuously bombarded by messages in media that guys need to be tall, have 6-pack abs, tan etc. to land a beautiful woman, whereas women are led to believe they need to be blonde, super skinny, yet paradoxically maintain large round breasts and small but firm butt (unless you're Jennifer Lopez or Shakira, that is).

There have been different beauty standards for ages and that is not the real issue. The problem lies deeper: As we almost inevitably fail to meet those standards, we start to believe that we can't have the kind of guy/girl that those same standards say we should desire. As we start to believe that and get into relationships, we can't escape this underlying, gnawing feeling that we have somehow 'settled' for that relationship because we can't do better. It's not what we really, truly desire, but it's good enough. Now obviously it's not a very healthy basis for a successful long-term companionship if both partners feel from the beginning that something is missing, that something could be better than it is.

Us humans have a built-in tendency to create patterns in our quest to understand the surrounding world. This tendency has helped us greatly to survive as a species, and to create all the amazing technology we have today. However, it works for both good and bad. We learn rapidly by associating different things to each other, giving birth to these patterns. We have been doing this already since we were toddlers; if we want mom's attention we simply need to cry and we get it. Or if we eat a lot of chocolate cake and then feel sick, our brains create a connection between eating the chocolate cake and the feeling of sickness that follows.

I think it's important to realize, that being able to create these kinds of connections is a very powerful ability. What if we didn't have it? Eating a chocolate cake and the feeling of sickness would be two completely separate events. We would be blind to the causality. Now just think how advanced this ability is in humans! All the sciences are based on it. Without being able to observe different phenomena and create patterns out of them, we would have only a rudimentary understanding of the world.

The problem with this amazing ability is, that it can also do us a disservice by creating connections that are false and potentially harmful to our wellbeing. A lot of people live their lives locked inside a limited set of rules. Rules that are conveyed from their beliefs. If you have observed as a child that other people in school get better grades than you, reasoned that maybe it's because you're stupid, and then started to really believe it, how do you think having that kind of belief will affect your future life? You're creating a reality in which it is an impossibility for you to get those good grades, or otherwise achieve same things the "smart people" do.

Or let's say you approach a woman in a bar who turns you down, and then witness another guy hit it off with her. Your built-in tendency starts to come up with reasons why the other guy was successful and you weren't. Maybe he was taller than you, so that's why you failed, or maybe he had more expensive clothes.

In the end it doesn't matter whether or not a belief is true. The limiting belief that "I'm overweight because of my genes, so I can never become as fit as the people in beauty magazines." might very well be spot-on accurate, but what if there are two people who both have similar genetic disadvantage, yet only one of them carries this belief? I'm certain that the person who has the limiting belief will not even bother trying to become fit or otherwise improve her health by exercising, whereas the other person keeps on working out, eating healthy and consequently improves her quality of life!

In essence, limiting beliefs create boundaries. They tell you what you can't do, what you can't achieve, what you can't be. Switching these negative limiting beliefs into positive enabling ones can hugely increase your faith and confidence in your abilities, and what is actually possible in life.

We have been creating these beliefs - both positive and negative - all our lives in our attempt to understand what is going on around us. And most people are completely oblivious to the fact that they have these beliefs. So the first step is to become aware that you have them, and then assess them critically. Which beliefs are such that help you achieve more in life, and which ones are holding you back? After this it's time to manually unlink those harmful connections and dismantle the limiting beliefs.

These beliefs usually contain three parts: external behavior, inner condition, and a link between the two. Here are couple examples:

"I am not smart enough to do well in business."

• External behavior: do well in business

• Inner condition: not smart enough

• Link: to (do)

"Women/men don't like me because I'm fat."

• External behavior: women/men don't like me

• Inner condition: I'm fat

• Link: because

Reframing is a cognitive technique that can be used to blast those limiting beliefs into oblivion. It can be used to destroy both existing beliefs and ones that are just starting to form inside your mind. In fact, it can become a very powerful tool to learn to recognize a limiting belief in the making, while the connection between external behavior and inner condition is still being created, and use reframing to prevent it from gaining foothold.

Basically reframing means consciously arguing against, or reasoning with the belief you have created. If you take time to think about a belief you have and apply reframing to it, you'll notice that the belief is most likely irrational and cannot be true, so why not just abandon it? After all, you are a rational person, aren't you?

Here are some ways to reframe a limiting belief. Let's use "Women/men don't like me because I'm fat." as an example:

• Counter example: Think of a time when a woman/man has liked you, or liked someone else despite the person being fat.

• Be specific: How does a guy/girl move from not knowing you to not liking you step-by-step simply because you're fat? The idea of there being an instant 'I see you - you're fat - I don't like you' causality is ridiculous, so what is really going on there? If you can't figure it out, then why are you still having this belief?

• Outcome orientation: Think about what is going to happen to your success level if you keep thinking this way? What if you'd think differently?

• "All"-ness framing: Do you think every single fat person in the history of the world has gone through their lives without another man/woman liking them?

• Reframe external behavior: People fancy different things. Not all men/women are bothered by you being fat. Some might even find it sexy.

• Reframe internal state: It's not that men/women don't like you, but you're probably not what they are ideally looking for in the opposite sex. This means you have an advantage, because you can come under the radar and surprise them with your other good qualities like sense of humor or wittiness.

One of the nicest examples of reframing (although it wasn't called that in the actual study, the principle is still the same) in real life that I've read about was done in a secondary school where the kids were divided into two groups for workshops. Both groups were taught study skills, but the other one also received a special module where they were taught that brain is not static, but more like a muscle that can be improved by working it out and doing proper exercises.

As a result, the kids who began to see their brains as something that develops and becomes better with practice started improving their study habits and grades. For me this is a clear example of how the limiting belief of "I'm not good at school because I was born stupid." was reframed. The walls built by that belief were torn down, and it became possible for the kids to do something that they couldn't have done before.

Please share your own thoughts and ideas in the comments! If you know of more ways to reframe limiting beliefs, let the rest of us know! :)

Evolving yourself into your best self

One of the biggest life lessons I had in 2009 was that my personality is in a state of constant change. The change may be small, subtle, and quiet or take big, life-changing leaps, but it's there and it's continuous. The fact that personality changes over time is not a big surprise in itself; I think everyone can take a look back a few years and immediately see how they were different back then compared to who they are now. However, I've hold the assumption that it takes major life experiences - such as break-ups, marriages, parents getting divorced, moving to live on your own for the first time etc. - for a personality to change, but considering everything that has happened in my own thought and behavior patterns during 2009, I have had to abandon that belief.

According to Dictionary.com, the definition of psychological personality is

a) the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual.

b) the organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of the individual.

In psychology, the act of learning implies behavior change. Meaning, that when something is learned, the behavior of the learner changes as a result. If personality then is an organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of an individual, learning changes also the personality of the learner. This does not require major life experiences. With open and curious mind it's easily possible to learn something new every single day, and the cumulative outcome of that learning is a changed personality.

It's very important to realize, that no one is born more confident, social, outgoing, competitive, creative etc. than anyone else. Your early life experiences are paramount in the forming of your personality, which affects how you behave and think in different situations. Although your personality greatly determines how you think and act, the way you think and act also affects your personality. It's a two-way connection.

Want to become more social? Study how those you consider more social than you behave in group situations. How do they look at people? How do they listen to others? What kind of body language they use? How do they project their voice? And most importantly, how do they behave differently compared to you? What is your current situation, and what needs to be changed to get from where you are to where you want to be?

You can learn a great deal by observing other people. After all, it is by watching others that we have learnt most of the essentials in life such as walking and speaking. We have an innate tendency to model our behavior after those around us. Just watch how two best friends mirror each others' wording, phrases, or body language and you know what I'm talking about.

So, in order to actually become more social, and have that characteristic become an ingrained, natural part of your personality, you need to first start behaving like a social person. Make a conscious effort to act differently than the "regular you" would. Use the information you've gained when observing others and model your behavior to fit the image of a social person you've created in your mind. It's not easy, and it takes focus and willpower to do something that doesn't come naturally to you, but the more you do it the easier it gets. This is a sign of the new behavior starting to become an integrated part of who you are.

If I had been told over a year ago that this kind of personality change is possible, I probably wouldn't have believed it. However, considering how much my own personality has changed during the past year, I can't really deny it either. For example, I began to build my confidence simply by starting to look people in the eye whenever I was walking outside. Then I focused on doing it while I was listening and speaking to others. And yes, it took quite a bit of conscious effort at first, but nowadays I don't even need to think about it. It comes automatically. After getting used to maintaining eye-contact, I began to study and focus on adopting more subtle signs of a confident person such as how to greet people, how to enter a room, how to take control of my environment, how to speak in a more confident manner etc. There is still work to do and room for improvement, but it's easy to recognize how I feel much more confident than I did only a few months ago, before I started to make this conscious behavior change.

Two more things you can do to help the process are visualization and having inner discussions inside your head. Visualize being in social situations and acting the way you would like to act. Imagine yourself being the soul of the party, imagine people enjoying having conversations with you. This might sound like fantasy stuff, but many top-level athletes, public speakers, and other successful people practice visualization. There is also a lot of literacy about its importance and effectiveness. And anyway, it's not like you're going to lose anything by doing it ;)

By inner discussions I mean talking to yourself like you're your own best friend. It's ridiculous how many people constantly criticize and put themselves down in their thoughts. Instead, psyche yourself up when going to a social situation. Say to yourself: "Bro, you look awesome tonight! Everyone is waiting for you to come so they can have a chat with you. You will leave a great impression on everyone as you talk with them in your calm, confident manner. You know and they know, that if you weren't going to show up the evening wouldn't be nearly as much fun as it's going to be now. All thanks to you!"

I believe strongly, that the inner discussions - or thought-chatter as some like to call it - and visualizations have an impact on your subconscious mind. I also believe, that we are in much less control of our actions than we would like to admit. Instead, the subconscious mind is steering us towards different paths, different decisions, depending on how we think and what our beliefs are. By visualizing yourself as a very social person, you're giving instructions to your subconscious mind that this social person is who you really are. As a result, the way you behave may start to change without you even noticing it at first, as it all feels very natural and you are just 'being yourself'.

A study [download PDF] was done in 2007 that very profoundly demonstrates just how powerful the mind can be, and how much power visualization has: A group of athletes were instructed to visualize exercising their hip muscles, and without any actual gym training or physical activity they had similar strength gains (24% increase in physical strength) as a control group who went to the gym and did the actual hip exercises (28% increase in physical strength). Apparently the mind cannot make a difference between real and imagined experiences. Considering that these people actually had significant physiological changes as a result of what they imagined, just think how much visualization could help to change your behavior, attitudes, beliefs, or way of thinking!

Your personality changes whether you like or not. The big questions is; are you willing to take responsibility of who you are now, and to consciously start guiding that personality change in order to become who you want to be, to become your best self?